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She resided longest in a boarding-house near Geneva, amid scenes renowned by the labors of Gibbon, Voltaire, and Madame de Staël, in sight of the Alps, absorbed in the theories of St. Simon and Proudhon, a believer in the necessary progress of the race as the result of evolution rather than of revelation or revolution.
And to complete this economic and logical confusion, Proudhon once again inverts history, and makes the just and free exchange of products and the circulation of values the starting-point for the determination of values, and thereby also the foundation of his realm of justice, freedom, and equality, in which economic forces have free play.
There is a contradiction here, but not on the part of the socialists. Proudhon was entirely consistent when he asked: "Can we not administer our goods, keep our accounts, arrange our differences, look after our common interests?"
But perhaps it is just this superficial smile which is the justification of Proudhon, who had to fight a severe and not always victorious battle for an apparently trivial cause.
It was raining; on the horizon, below the black, starless sky, a vague clarity began to appear. Caesar took out his Proudhon book and immersed himself in it. When it began to be day they were already getting near Rome.
An essay which Proudhon wrote upon the introduction of Sunday rest, from the point of view of morality, health, and the relations of a family estate, brought him a bronze medal from the Academy, and he was able afterwards to say with truth: "My Socialism received its baptism from a learned society, and I have an academy as sponsor"; certainly a remarkable boast for one who denied all authority.
It cannot be denied that herewith Proudhon, who, in all his works, raged furiously against Utopians, has none the less created a Utopia of his own, not, indeed, by forcibly urging mankind through an ideal change, but by attempting to mould life into an ideal shape without, like others, appealing to force, or venturing to organise the forces of terror, in order to accomplish his ideal.
Proudhon saw very clearly the end before his eyes, strove to attain it unfalteringly and steadily, and amid all the variety of the developments in which he preached his ideas to the world for a quarter of a century, never betrayed one iota of its contents. The contradiction from which his work suffered lay deeper. It lay in the form of his thought, and partly in the period to which he belonged.
"The letters of Proudhon, even outside the circle of his particular friends, will always be of value; we can always learn something from them, and here is the proper place to determine the general character of his correspondence.
"Le Miserere, or the Repentance of a King," which he published in March, 1845, in the "Revue Independante," during that Lenten season when Lacordaire was preaching in Lyons, proves that, though devoting himself with ardor to the study of economical problems, Proudhon had not lost his interest in questions of religious history.
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